


après moi, le déluge

by brella



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Yuletide New Year's Resolutions Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-08 17:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When two opposing objects collide, they exert equal and opposite reaction forces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	après moi, le déluge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariad/gifts).



> Written for Yuletide 2013 based on prompt #6 of [this post](http://ariad.dreamwidth.org/525565.html).

Casey Blevins knows how to climb trees.

This is a fact. She’s always been pretty decent with facts. Genghis Khan became ruler of the Mongols in 1206. The average human being can survive for three days without water. Joan of Arc burned to death on May 30, 1431. Her mother’s eyes are green, and prettier than her own. Mechanical energy does not change for a free falling mass or a swinging pendulum.

Sometimes, when her heart is beating too fast or her palms are sweating or she has to take an Art class as an elective her sophomore year, she goes through the things she knows in her head. The Doppler effect. Planck’s constant. Bohr model. Velocity can only be constant when the net force is zero. Bell’s theorem establishes that all reality must be non-local.

When two opposing forces collide, they exert equal and opposite reaction forces.

She takes comfort in knowing things; she always has. She has trouble sleeping, sometimes, because she has so many questions. And besides knowing how far the Earth is from the Sun (92,960,000 miles), she also knows how to swing a mean left hook, how to walk in high heels, how to survive in the wilderness, how to kickbox, how to shoot a gun, how to do gymnastics, how to arch and sink through the five basic positions of ballet, how to hit a softball, and how to climb a tree.

Her father used to like to tell a story. “She knew how to climb a tree, all right,” he would chuckle, “But it wasn’t until she got to the very top that she realized she didn’t know how to come back down!”

Casey likes to think that she never bothered learning to come down because she’s still climbing.

* * *

Shoot for the eyes or the heart or the throat. If you want to bleed out a carcass, cut straight and true along the throat and hang it from a tree until all the red has gone out of it. Do not love. Do not cry. Do not run away. And if you do have to run away, cut down all who try to stop you. Cut down all who try to help you. If your weapons are taken away from you, become your own weapon.

Kseniya’s voice may have once been made for lullabies, but it carried no trace of them for as long as Irina had known her. Then again, Irina has never been prone to sentimentalities and drivel like bedtime stories or fireside songs; in her childhood, she walked and she hunted and she traced distorted shapes into the burls on the wood of the ceiling over her bed and she once painted her whole face in the blood of a rabbit she shot just to see what it would feel like, smearing the still-warm life-stuffs of another creature – a wilder creature – onto her skin, then tingling from the unforgiving cold.

It had been the only time she had ever seen her mother look proud of her.

Irina, now, still knows how to bleed out a deer. She knows how to shoot a moving target and how to chop down a tree and how to avoid patches of thin ice; she knows how to whittle and how to pick the right wildflowers and how to cover up her footprints so that no one in the world will know where to find her. She knows her fair share of Military History and Dostoevsky and she can recite most Shevchenko and Kostenko in their original Ukrainian if she feels like it.

And she is very good at running, also. But only if there is something worth chasing and catching and making her own.

Raised a warrior, Irina still knows how burials work. She knows what it is like to be dehydrated and to feel parched from the inside-out to the point of crumbling; Abraham had chided her for wandering away from the camp; Vanessa Richmond with her pretty hair and her gentle looks had told her that the average human can only survive three days without water.

“I am not the average,” Irina had spat, or tried to, and she had missed the blizzards more than anything in the world in that exact moment, and she had sneered at herself for choosing to dig a grave for her slowly bleeding mother, instead of watching her body burn to cinders with the rest of that house whose wooden roof never took the shape of a map to the stars.

* * *

“It’s important, sweetheart,” Casey’s dad says, “To put other people before yourself.”

“Dad, I don’t want to talk about being good to humanity; I’m trying to read about Marie Curie,” Casey retorts. Sprawled out on her bed, legs swinging rhythmically behind her head, cutoffs strewing pale blue strands of frayed denim over her skin, blonde hair piled in a bun on top of her head, she turns a page of the tome open in front of her and reaches for another piece of caramel corn in the bowl beside her on the quilt.

Dan Blevins sighs. “Casey, I’m sure Marie Curie will not be offended if you put her on hold, seeing as how she’s been pushing daisies since the 1930s.”

Casey lets out a loud sigh and shoots her father a flat look, but flicks the book shut with one hand and props her chin up with the other, flumping her legs limply down.

“I’m listening,” she monotones.

Dan rolls his eyes. “All right, fine; sit there and _don’t_ care about the world. But let me tell you something; that’s just going to make you even worse prepared when you run into somebody who cares even less than you do.”

“At this point, I really don’t know if that’s possible,” Casey sighs, which is an absolute lie; her middle school had handed out a mandatory survey of all students’ future aspirations and Casey had simply listed, _Change the world_.

Not for the better, necessarily, and not for the worse. Just change it. Just put her mark on it and make her parents proud and settle down with a pet canary and, like, maybe save it, if it needed a superhero and nobody else stepped up. She’d always fancied the idea of being a superhero.

“Case, are you listening?” Dan laughs.

“Dad, I love you, but you are seriously cramping my genius,” Casey joshes him, and he ruffles her hair and says they’ll talk later and that he loves her too and she should leave some genius for the rest of the world.

Casey opens her book again.

* * *

“Fight me,” Vanessa says, her grin mighty. She holds the sparring bo staff out in front of her with impeccable placement of the hands.

“You are not worth the time,” Irina calls back. She wipes her bloody nose and pushes Guillaume over again for giving it to her. “I would just beat you in ten seconds. There is none of the fun in that.”

“I’ll bet you my dessert tonight that I’ll beat _you_ ,” Vanessa proposes. “Or at least that it’ll take you longer than ten seconds.”

“Ten seconds, Richmond, is generous,” Irina fires back, but then considers, twirling one end of her short ponytail in thought. “What is for dessert tonight?”

“Satsumas,” Ian pipes up from the reading corner. Irina does not know why the physical training tent has a reading corner.

“Thank you, Ian.” Irina snorts, pauses, cocks one hip, and then shrugs, striding toward the other bo staffs to choose one. “Very well. I would enjoy to humiliate you.”

Vanessa has her on the floor in fourteen seconds. Irina lays there, the end of Vanessa’s staff pressing into her throat, and glowers fearsomely up at the other girl, who still hasn’t stopped beaming like she’s just won a thousand lotteries in one go.

“See, Irina, that’s your problem,” Vanessa tells her with a fond shake of her head. “You always think you’re the only one in the room doing all the pushing.”

She retracts the staff and hunches over, offering Irina her hand.

“I do not know what you mean,” Irina mutters, glancing away.

Vanessa laughs. It sounds like sunshine and all the other things Irina hopes never to be.

“I just mean that you should maybe start noticing you’re not alone,” Vanessa says. Her smile, at last, softens from triumphant to compassionate, but Irina knows that her words have two meanings. “Lemme help you up.”

Irina swats her hand away harder than she should.

* * *

“You see, Casey Blevins, that is your problem,” Irina murmurs. The blazing blue light from the cylinder behind her edges her entire silhouette in burning white, and Casey, spread-eagled and pinned on the floor, glares defiantly up at her, blood in her mouth and nose and on the tips of her fingers (though the latter blood is not hers). “You still think the world is worth saving.”

Irina is straddling her, gloved hands gripping Casey’s wrists, face sharpened by an acid smirk that makes her steely eyes seem even colder. This is the first time Casey has ever seen her, she’s sure, but there’s a stirring and unsettled part of her that can’t help feeling they’ve done this a hundred times before, infinitely fighting tooth and claw for a world they don’t understand, getting each other’s blood on their knuckles and never asking the right questions or, maybe more importantly, giving the right answers. This is, simultaneously, the girl she has to save the world from, and the only one who can help her save it in the first place.

“We are not so different, you and I,” Irina goes on. Her lip is split and gushing red. “In fact, we are more similar than you want to think.” She leans in closer, her eyes steadily fixated on Casey’s. “That is why your little parlor trick did not work on me, and it is why mine did not work on you. We cannot control each other because we _are_ each other, somewhere. No, we are not so different. Just as the moon and the sun are not so different.”

“They’re completely different,” Casey says, frowning. “The Sun is a star. The moon is – it’s a fucking _moon_ ; they’re _completely different_. A moon can’t go supernova. And you’re insane.”

“What is it that they call the moment when a star cannot revert its path toward becoming a black hole?” Irina asks. Her black hair begins to whip around her pale face as the speed of the cylinder increases.

Casey can’t _not_ tell her.

“The event horizon,” she rasps.

“Perhaps that is what we are, then.” Irina suddenly releases Casey’s hands, leaning further back from her and raising her palms at either side of her head. “The other’s event horizon.”

“I don’t think you really have a lid on what you’re talking about.” Casey swallows. The air is starting to break off from its place in her lungs, torn asunder and afar by the roaring wind. “Why are you doing this? What makes you think you have the right to decide what happens to the world?”

“I am a god, just as you are,” Irina says. “That is why. The world cannot make these choices for itself, Casey Blevins. It can only continue to know everything but what is best for it.”

“Irina…” Casey tries to shout, but all of the sound is gone from the room now.

Irina throws her arms out and tosses her head back and the light grows brighter still. Casey closes her eyes as tightly as she can and, for a second, lets herself hope that if she wishes it hard enough, if she thinks it hard enough, if she loves it hard enough, the world will close itself in bedroom darkness around the power threatening now to blind it and tear it apart. She thinks of Jade, her freckled fingers poised so perfectly on a fountain pen as she scribbles out every word that spills from her ears and her eyes, her smiles dimming the sun itself. She thinks of her parents, of her father lifting her skyward and spinning her and telling her that if she tried she could fly right out of his hands. She thinks of Hunter, staring at her longer than the rest of them ever have; she thinks of Hisao, running toward his brother; she thinks of Zoe, the only time she’d heard her laugh, spouting off the periodic table like someone would spout off a commercial jingle.

Irina’s hand suddenly grips hers, a tangle of shaking fingers.

“Are you ready to live as gods?” Irina screams, almost sings.

Casey tries to yank her hand away, but no matter how much she struggles, the force around her digits does not weaken.

_Mechanical energy does not change for a free falling mass or a swinging pendulum._

“Then exalt,” Irina whispers, in a sudden, perfect silence.

Casey Blevins’s eyes tear themselves open.

“Julie?” Jade, years older, hair longer, asks. Her hand slides across the table and her fingers just barely graze the skin over Julie’s knuckles. “Did you hear what I said?”

“No,” Julie croaks after a moment, and then shakes her head and clears her throat. “No, I’m sorry. What was it again?”

* * *

“Be silent, Irina.” Kseniya’s gravelly voice crackled in the cold night. “Be silent, and listen to the snow. It is all falling for you.”

Irina’s small fingers touched the window pane. She almost drew them away again, for how cold it made them feel.

“Mother,” she whispered, “Will it be spring soon?”

Her mother had not answered.


End file.
